Jon Miller Interview

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The voice of ESPN Major League Baseball talks curses, players, and parks.

By Hilary Goldstein

Over the past two decades, Jon Miller has become one of the most recognizable voices in broadcasting. The voice of the San Francisco Giants, Miller has also been partnered with Joe Morgan on ESPN Sunday Night Baseball, a relationship that's lasted fourteen years. Miller's baritone voice will venture to a new medium next spring. As announced yesterday, Miller provides play-by-play for Sega Sports' ESPN Major League Baseball, coming spring 2004.

Miller sat down with IGN Sports recently to give us his thoughts on the state of baseball. The gregarious broadcaster offers words of wisdom for Major League owners, tips for the hard-luck Oakland Athletics, and why St. Louis humidity would force him to choose radio over television broadcasting.

IGN Sports: In most interviews, we have to play it fair and ask about the most popular baseball teams, like the Yankees. However, I'm going to be selfish today and ask about the teams I care about.

Jon Miller: Okay.

IGN Sports: The big baseball story this year was the Cubs and Red Sox, the two cursed teams of baseball, making a push towards the World Series. How many more years do you think the A's need to lose a deciding Game 5 in the playoffs before they have a legitimate "curse"?

Jon Miller: Well, it was really disturbing, not that they just lost, but the way that it happened. In Game 3 of that series, which Joe Morgan and I worked, they had some chances to score runs that went beyond chances. The runs were there, all they had to do was step on home plate. [Eric] Byrnes... I mean, the ball is at the backstop and there he is, coming to the plate and he runs into [Jason] Varitek and all he can seem to think of at that point is that he's hurt and he's upset with Varitek and so he shoves him. He does everything except walk over and touch home plate. That was one of the worst I'd ever seen.

And then [Miguel] Tejada, after he ran into Bill Mueller at third base on his way home -- I think he would have actually scored anyway -- but halfway home, for some reason, he stopped. As if assuming "I'm gonna be awarded home plate here." And then they tagged him out. Those were two brutal plays.

IGN Sports: Do you think that what happened to the A's the three previous years in the playoffs has crept into their mind. It seems as if they started self-destructing in Game 3 and then it just carried on from there and got worse.

Jon Miller: There's a similarity between those incidents in [this year's] Game 3 and Game 3 of two years before when Jeremy Giambi did not slide at home plate and [Derek] Jeter came out of nowhere and made the play and got him. What was similar about those plays, in each case it was a winnable game. If Giambi had scored that run, there's no question that the whole thing had turned and they were gonna win that game and the series was going to be over. In hindsight we know, as a matter of fact, that if Byrnes had stepped on home plate and Tejada kept on running, they would have won that game. We would never have gotten to Trot Nixon's home run in extra innings. In each case, when they ended up losing those games in Game 3, I think there was this little cloud hanging over them [for the rest of the series]. They're like, "Wait a minute, this thing should have been over yesterday."

They also had some unforeseen things happen. Jermaine Dye, in that Yankee series, hits that foul ball against El Duque off his shin, breaks his leg. And he'd been [the A's] biggest hitter down the stretch. So they lose him for the rest of Game 4 and the deciding Game 5. [This year], Tim Hudson's out there and what did he go, one inning? Sometime in the second inning he's gotta leave that game. That's just a bad break. And they lost Mulder during the season. I think they just had a couple of bad breaks there. Clearly for the first two games and much of the third game, they looked like the superior team.

This thing about a curse, I don't buy it personally. I really got tired of hearing it, in regards to the Cubs, especially, with this "billy goat" curse. It was just sort of getting almost irrationally silly, because the real curse on the Cubs had to do with the 1908 season when they had a great pennant race with the Giants. In the final week of the season, on a [Giants] game winning hit, Fred Merkle, as the run was scoring, was supposed to go from first to second, but in his excitement never went over and touched second base. Eventually the Cubs, even with fans pouring out on the field, got the umpire to come back out as they brought the ball to second base, tagged the bag and [the umpire] called Merkle out. Instead of a win for the Giants, that game had to be replayed.

They were tied on the last day of the season and they replayed that game and the Cubs won it this time and thus went to the World Series. Clearly, the Giants rightfully belonged in that series and the Cubs have never won a World Series since. I think it's that curse, of the fact that the rightful World Series was stolen away from the Giants, that has cursed the Cubs ever since. It has nothing to do with a billy goat whatsoever.